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Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Desert Heat by P.H. Turner Excerpt & Giveaway

Desert Heat

by P.H. Turner

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GENRE: Romantic Suspense

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BLURB:

Social
worker Jordan Bia finds a child who escaped her captors and a life in the sex
trade, but four other girls from her small Mexican village were not so lucky.
Smugglers hide their human cargo in the hoodoos of a remote canyon on the
reservation—a place the Navajo shun, fearful of the witches who practice their
black rituals and feast on the dark energy of evil. Mysterious rites, omens of
death, and bodies litter the canyon.

When she meets Navajo
police officer Sam Tohee, sparks fly fueled by the danger of hunting men who
buy and sell little girls. Techno savvy Jordan plots to trap the smugglers and
free the rest of the children, but unless she and Sam can find the power to
defeat the witches she may not live long enough to save the girls.

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Excerpt One:

I walked down the center of the shadowy street, far away
from men who might slither out of alleys and doorways and grab me, a lone
female. The woman whose child I had come to check on lived over a bar when she
functioned well enough to remember where she lived. She and the child were
nowhere to be found. I had tarried too long, and the night hovered under the
thin crescent of moonlight that marked the time between the dark moon and the
new moon. Clouds scuttled across the moon, darkening the sky.

The puny glow from the single streetlight outlined two men
slouched between boarded-up buildings, smoking and swigging from bottles
sheathed in tattered brown bags. They catcalled and hooted, "We got
whatcha want, girlie." I scurried faster to my old Honda Civic, parked a
block away. My heart pounded and my calves burned from the effort to put distance
between me and their drunken lewdness.

Soft crying, a sound more like a wounded kitten than a
person, stopped me in the middle of the street. I cocked my head toward the dim
alley but only saw shadows. The pitiful sound drifted out, forlorn and frightened.
I scanned the street for movement. No one was there. I walked on my toes to the
mouth of the alley. Nothing stirred. Tiny fingers of light trickled into the
alley from the streetlight. "Who's there?"

The crying became snuffling, and then silence.

Footsteps rustled. I called into the darkness, asking if
anyone needed help.

"Si,"
the voice whimpered.

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AUTHOR Bio and Links:

I call
Austin, Texas home now after working on the East and West coasts, the Rocky
Mountains, and an island in the Gulf of Mexico. I've come full circle to live
and work close to the farm my family settled in the 1850's.

Truth is
stranger than fiction, and years in the news business provided lots of peculiar
characters and stories to write about. My books are set in my favorite places,
the desert canyons and high mountains of the American West.